How do you find and replace "within selected text" in a textedit document (version 1.8, mountain lion)

Question

In the textedit version on Snow leopard it was possible to search and replace within a peice of selected text only i.e. not the entire file. This was a very useful feature because you could select a paragraph and replace all occurences of word1 with word2 within that paragraph only! This feature appears to be missing from the mountain lion version of textedit (version 1.8). Or can anyone tell me how to do it ... ?

Answer 1

Having 46 people view a post without replying is not unusual. Some people look at a question to see if it's something they'd like to know the answer to, and then come back  when it has eventually been answered.
I'm not sure if you need to escape forward slashes in Dreamweaver's Find and Replace dialog box, but I normally do because both JavaScript and PHP normally use forward slashes as delimiters to mark the beginning and end of the regex like this:
var pattern = /[A-Z]{4}/; // JavaScript
$pattern = '/[A-Z]{4}/';   // PHP
When a forward slash appears inside the regex, you need to escape it with a backslash to avoid confusion with the closing delimiter.
As you have worked out, a capturing group is created by wrapping part of the regex in parentheses.
If you want to match exactly 38 characters, you can use [\S\s]{38}. That includes spaces, newline characters, symbols, everything.
If you're trying to find everything between two tags, you can do this:
(<\/tag_name>)([^<]+)
The closing tag is captured as $1 and everything up to the next opening tag is captured as $2.
Learning regular expressions is not easy. I don't claim to be an expert, but I enjoy the challenge of trying to solve them. If you're interested in regular expressions, there are several books published by O'Reilly. "Mastering Regular Expressions" is the ultimate authority, but it's a difficult read (not because it's badly written, but because of the complexity of the subject). "Regular Expressions Cookbook" is very good. There's also a new "Introducing Regular Expressions", but I haven't read it.